Shakespeare's Macbeth is getting a Vietnam-era retelling in a new staging at the Long Wharf Theatre, which will be directed by Eric Ting and billed as Macbeth [1969].

Initially inspired by a Smithsonian Magazine article about soldiers suffering from shell-shock following WWI, associate artistic director Ting and Long Wharf artistic director Gordon Edelstein settled upon Vietnam, with the focus on two soldiers who are attended by three nurses as they return home from war.

"We chose to set it in 1969 in the midst of the Vietnam War because it gives us the historical distance through which we can explore how Shakespeare's play speaks to the traumas of conflict; and because we felt there was a much closer kinship between the Vietnam War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (as opposed to say the first or second World Wars) in terms of the national zeitgeist surrounding them," Ting said in a statement.